Hi,

I have been recently playing around with GADTs, using them to keep track of how many times a functor has been applied. This provides a solution to what seems to be a long standing problem, summarized here:

https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/mapping-over-a-nested-functor/

If the nesting depth is part of the type, it is possible to apply fmap automatically as needed. This allows you to write fairly elegant expressions like:

data Person = Person { name :: String, age :: Integer, gender :: String, status :: String } deriving Show

let persons = fromList' [Person {name="Alice", age=20, gender="F", status="Good"}, Person {name="Bob", age=18, gender="M", status="Good"}, Person {name="Chuck", age=16, gender="M", status="Bad"}] :: NList N1 Person

persons `select` age

-- [20,18,16]

persons `groupby` gender `select` age

-- [[20],[18,16]]

persons `groupby` gender `groupby` status `select` age

-- [[[20]],[[18],[16]]]

Note that "`select` age" works regardless of nesting depth. You can also append or remove nesting levels:

persons `groupby` gender `select` age `produce` (\x -> [0..x])

-- [[[0..20]],[[0..18],[0..16]]]

persons `groupby` gender `reduce` (sumof age)

-- [20, 34]

Would this kind of thing be of interest? The code is here:

https://github.com/filonik/nlists

Please feel free to suggest improvements.

Cheers,

Daniel